


Perish from the Earth

by khooliha



Category: Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Blood Magic, Gen, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 14:06:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4103662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khooliha/pseuds/khooliha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it takes more than skill or luck to survive the wastes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perish from the Earth

The man was broken and bloody and dying and the boy was there, sniffing around this pre-corpse. The jacket would do quite nicely, he just needed to be a little patient. It was hard. 

The man was dying relatively quietly, baking in the high noon sun, but the boy didn’t want to get too close. Even a dead snake could be full of venom. 

But as the minutes ticked on the boy grew impatient and he scuttled sideways through the dirt. He circled and slid again and again, concentric patterns narrowing in on the silent body. Surely that had taken long enough, surely he was on his way to rotting now, not dying, and the boy reached out-

The grip on his wrist was adrenaline hard even as the man’s eyes fought to focus on his scavenger. The boy was overwhelmed by the grim detail of him – the boy had seen death before but rarely so close up, so wet and glistening. The boy was yanked closer and the eyes focused. 

“I am Max Rockatansky,” he hissed with coppery breath, a low wheeze adding urgency to the edge of the words, “and if I am remembered I will not die.” Then, nearly instantly, his grip loosened and he began to cough and convulse, but not for long. The boy scrambled back, dragging his blood sticky wrist in the sand to try and scrape the man off of him. That feeling of stickiness was moving across him, carried by sweat and fear, and next to him the man died. 

The boy had been burned before, by the sun and hot chrome and petrol fire, but this was different – deeper and worse. He rolled in the dirt, kicking like a stuck lizard, and he saw a world that wasn’t unmade, saw the end descend like night, saw failure after failure until he was a taut string humming low with energies he couldn’t control and when he snapped he whipped around the world, lashing back and drawing blood. A snapped line couldn’t protect anything, but with enough mad velocity it could cut. 

The boy was not Max long – he spent too much time trying to unmake himself to properly survive. He couldn’t banish the people he had never known, let alone their deaths. He added his own sorrows without meaning to, changing the tapestry of his unwelcome vision. He could see himself in his passenger and he pushed against his own narrow chest, not knowing that there was no passenger, there was only Max, and he was Max now. 

A scuffle and one slash of a switchblade later and the boy was bleeding uselessly to death on some canyon floor. The woman who had killed him quietly witnessed the life oozing out of him and he heard the twin hum to the lines inside of him that frayed apart and coalesced and broke again. He weakly beckoned to her and when she knelt by him he spoke the words he had promised himself that he would never say and they fell as sweetly from his lips as water. 

Her gang was surprised at the name change, but calling her Max was easy enough. And within her three strands wove shapes of madness and regret and she brought them to bear. She survived. 

If you moved through the world among people more often than not life was brutish and short. Max flowed through the world, nearly nameless, trying and failing until he stopped trying. That impulse beaten from him, he focused simply on not succumbing to the roaring in his head, on surviving. 

Max’s lifetimes of instincts still betrayed him sometimes and she saved a kid and wrecked her bike in the process. More than one vital piece was punctured by the grimy, twisted metal and the kid was pressing his hands to the wounds, useless but trying. She looked at the sad, shivering thing and realized he was older than she had thought. He was doing badly out here, wouldn’t survive. But then again neither would she. Max raised his hands and pressed them to either side of the kid’s face, making him look at her. She spoke the words that had been spoken to her and some dozen lives before that. The kid rose Max. He would survive. 

Over a dozen lines of pain thrumming and weaving together could form a net, something studier than any one strand alone. Max didn’t notice because it existed outside the scope of his view. Survival left him no room for contemplation. Capture didn’t either, blood leeched from his flesh, caged and helpless. Nets can catch though, can snag on the world, and when he caught on the edge of a war rig the sensation was so unfamiliar that it didn’t register. He looked dedication, surety of purpose, sacrifice in the eye and he was not unchanged. 

Max stayed with them because he had to, and then because he didn’t, the word _we_ filling his voice and his thoughts. Suddenly his life was not about the choices he didn’t have but the ones he did. And though he left when the deed was done he returned again and again, because entanglements were not so simple to sort out. 

This was the final return, but he had caught her one last time, bearing her safely to the ground as his blood watered the parched earth. This life had been far longer than his others, since he had people to watch his back, who cared, but he had not forgotten the words. However, as he looked at her, he realized that they didn’t fit. He searched around for something else. He found words that were strange, but they didn’t taste of blood and fire. 

“Carry me?” he asked and though the “one last time” went unspoken it rang between them, a bell across the wastes. She had already carried him so many times, caught him when he was falling. He couldn’t count how many times they had leaned into one another, both too tired to stand alone. She was looking at him thoughtfully and he realized that if she refused him he would die. For the first time in lifetimes that would be fine. It would be worth it. 

He was feeling cold now, but no panic moved through him. He had done so much more than survive this life. The net that was his mind sang and, for the moment, no lines broke and he was still. She nodded at him and held his hand as he died. When the life moved between them it didn’t burn. 

Two names flowed through the wastes now, as easy as anything did. The threads still thrummed but they were tempered now, stronger. They moved together, answering to both names, changing whatever they touched. For the world was changing, slowly but surely, and they intended to see as much of it through as they could. And there was always more than survival. 


End file.
